Chapter X: The Moral Consciousness of Hellas: an Ideal of Self-Realization (2)

In the ethical system of Socrates we have a good illustration of the truth that great men are the product of their age. With all his originality and profound spiritual insight, Socrates could not and did not rise much above the plane of the common moral consciousness of his contemporaries. He stood on essentially Greek ground. His morality was the morality of his time and place. In his practical code of morals he made the Greek virtue of self-control or moderation a cardinal virtue; he laid the Greek emphasis upon the civic virtues, dying rather than disobey or evade the decree of his city; he entertained the common Greek ideas respecting the family and the domestic virtues; he saw nothing to disapprove in the life of the hetæra; he viewed the beautiful from a standpoint wholly Greek, almost identifying beauty with goodness; he was thoroughly Greek in the aristocratic tendency of his ethical teachings, making the practice of true virtue the prerogative of the cultured class alone; he had the ordinary Greek conscience in regard to slavery; and he never detached himself from that narrow Greek prejudice which saw in the Hellenes the elect race. He never proclaimed, as did many a later Greek and Roman moralist, the essential unity of the human race.

[Sidenote: Plato and his ethical system]

Socrates made virtue and man’s moral nature the subject of philosophic reflection. His pupil, Plato, systematized his master’s teachings, and, reducing these and the common ethical notions of his time to scientific form laid the basis of the science of ethics.

Plato agreed with Socrates in teaching that to know the good is necessarily to seek it. He accordingly makes wisdom the first of the virtues, by wisdom meaning insight, the clear recognition of what constitutes the highest good. Issuing from this primary virtue of wisdom, like a stream from a fountain, are the virtues of courage, temperance, and justice.

From wisdom comes courage, for perfect knowledge of good and evil casts out fear; and moderation, for knowledge of higher and lower, of the penalty that awaits all excess, leads to prudence and self-control; and justice, for knowledge of one’s relations to one’s fellows creates consideration for the rights of others. Plato here simply systematizes and reduces to scientific form those various virtues which the common Greek conscience recognized as constituting moral excellence.

Particularly noteworthy is Plato’s doctrine that virtue in the state is the same as virtue in the individual. There is need of emphasis being laid anew upon this teaching at the present time, when the disciples of Machiavelli would give fresh vogue to the doctrine of a double standard of morality, one for the individual and another for the state. The modern world might well sit at Plato’s feet and learn that virtue is ever one and the same, and that the moral law can no more be traversed with impunity by a nation than by a single individual.

In many of his ethical teachings Plato anticipated and deeply influenced Christian doctrines. He has been called the precursor of the Fathers of the Church. “His ideas on virtue,” as Denis observes, “take us far from Greece and antiquity; they seem addressed rather to the saints and anchorites than to the citizens of Sparta and Athens.”[502] His doctrines that the way of approach to God is through contemplation; that withdrawal from the turmoil of public life is a furtherance of the true life; that the body is a “prison house” of the soul; that the soul is immortal and that there awaits it in the after life recompense for deeds done in the flesh; that expiation for sin is an ethical necessity; that punishment is not a deterrent and restraint but a remedy that restores to health the sin-diseased soul[503]--all these ideas and principles were in exact accord with the Christian moral consciousness, and through St. Augustine and other Fathers of the Church came to enrich and reënforce the ethical system of the monastic and the papal Church of the medieval age.

Perhaps what is the most admirable of Plato’s teachings is embodied in this petition: “And may I, being of sound mind, do to others as I would that they should do to me.”[504] The significance of this lies in the fact that it is a prayer, and that the petitioner asks that he may be of sound mind when he reflects on what he would like to have others do to him.

Yet notwithstanding the loftiness and nobility of much of Plato’s ethical thought, still, like Socrates, he stood almost wholly on Greek ground. His ethics is scarcely more than a justification of the common Greek morality of his time. He destroys the family in the interest of the state; he approves of the exposition of ill-formed, unpromising infants; he makes morality to be a class thing--only select and cultured souls are with him capable of genuine virtue. He accepts slavery as a necessary institution of the state; he practically shuts out the non-Greek world from the sphere of morality;[505] and with the common Greek he believes that to do evil to one’s enemies is an imperative duty.[506] Nor does Plato, like Hebrew seer, rise high enough above the general Greek viewpoint to discern the great law of moral progress, and to prevision the historical goal--ethical world unity.

[Sidenote: Aristotle and his ethics]

Aristotle makes Plato’s classification of the virtues the basis of his well-rounded system of ethics. In one important respect, however, he differs from Plato; he did not believe that knowledge of the right necessarily leads to its practice. He recognized the fact that man though knowing the good often perversely follows evil.

The great defect of Aristotelian ethics is its failure to rise to the ethical conception of collective humanity. In the moral inequality of men, which he assumes as the presupposition of his ethics, he even exaggerated the common Greek view. He divided men so rigorously into classes with varying grades of moral capacity that his moral system was ethically like the caste system of the Indian Brahmans. To affirm the moral equality of men seemed to him to be a species of treason against the true humanity, a crime against Greek civilization.

According to Aristotle the slave was a being so morally different from the freeman as to constitute practically another species. He was not wholly incapable of virtue, but could practice only such servile virtues as obedience and humility. The last, though a virtue in a slave, was in a freeman an unworthy weakness.

Barbarians were slaves by nature. Hence it was right for the Greeks to make war on them and reduce them to slavery, because “for that end they were born.”[507] Plato had in his _Laws_ accepted slavery as a political necessity; Aristotle proclaimed it as a part of the natural order of things. This doctrine had far-reaching historical consequences. Aristotle’s declaration that slaves are merely animated instruments, are men incapable of virtue, worked as powerfully in destroying ancient slavery as the _obiter dictum_ of Chief Justice Taney of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Dred Scott case, that negro slaves have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, worked for the destruction of negro slavery in the Southern states. For, as Professor Denis says, by pushing too far the argument, by founding slavery on natural right, Aristotle provoked thought and protest, and led the Stoics to reject with indignation his theories and to proclaim the moral equality of master and slave, of Greek and barbarian.[508]

Aristotle’s ethics exercised very little influence either upon the actual moral life or the ethical speculations of antiquity; but in the medieval time it came to exert a profound influence upon Christian ethics.[509] The schoolmen made it the trunk into which they grafted Christian morals--with incongruous results, as we shall see later.

[Sidenote: Decay of the Greek city state and the accompanying decay of the Greek ideal of character]

The political revolution in Hellas in the fourth century B.C. had deep import for Greek morality. That century saw the triumph of Macedonia over the Greek cities. This meant the triumph of despotic monarchy over city democracy. This revolution in the political realm meant a great revolution in the realm of morals, for the reason that, as we have seen, the old Greek ideal of excellence was largely based upon the relation of the individual to the state. With the loss of Greek liberty the very basis of the Greek ideal of character was removed, and the virtues of the type tended to disappear.[510]

In the despotic monarchies of the successors of Alexander there was little room for the growth and exercise of those virtues of citizenship which had been nourished in the free air of the ancient city. The virtues now in vogue and fostered by the new monarchical régime were no longer those of the patriot citizen and the patriot warrior, but those of the pliant subject, the servile courtier, and the mercenary soldier. In Plutarch’s _Lives_, out of the twenty heroes and worthies whom the biographer selected as the noblest representatives of the virtues most highly esteemed by the Greeks, we find only two who lived after the general loss of Greek freedom, and these[511] were men whose characters were formed in the cities of the Achæan League, in which the ancient liberties of Hellas were maintained till the rise of the Roman power. It could not be otherwise, so completely were the fortunes of the Greek moral ideal bound up with the fortunes of the Greek city state.

But besides the decay of the free city there were other causes contributing to the moral decadence which marked Hellenism in the Alexandrian Age. The close contact of Greek culture with the corrupt society of the Orient had disastrous consequences for Greek morality. The principal courts of the Hellenistic East were plague spots of moral contagion. The virus of gross sensual immorality was communicated to Greece, and Greek society was fatally infected. The Orontes emptied into the Ilissus and the Eurotas, as later it emptied into the Tiber.

And still another contributing cause of the moral decline in Hellas was the sudden acquisition of vast individual and social wealth through the conquest and exploitation of the East. The morals of no age or people have been proof against suddenly acquired riches. One explanation of this is that new and untried sources of pleasure, most often illicit sensuous pleasure, are opened up, and the temptation to selfish indulgence is irresistible, coming as it does before self-restraint, in the face of these unaccustomed solicitations, has become a habit.

Still another cause of the moral degeneracy of the age, one which we shall have occasion to speak of more at length a little further on, is to be sought in the fact that the period was one of transition in religion as well as in politics and social relations. Greek morality was, it is true, based in the main upon the old system of independent city life. Yet Greek morality was in a way braced by religion and even in part based upon it. Now in the Alexandrian Age the religious system of Hellas was undergoing a process of disintegration. Men were losing faith in their ancestral gods. Philosophic skepticism was widespread. Inevitably this movement in the religious realm caused all that part of the moral system dependent in any degree upon the old religious doctrines and teachings to weaken and crumble away.

[Sidenote: Ethical products of the Hellenistic Age: Stoicism and Epicureanism]

There were, however, two ethical products of the Hellenistic Age which render that period one of the most important of all epochs in the moral evolution of humanity. These were Stoicism and Epicureanism. At first blush it may seem strange that out of the same environment there should arise two systems of life and thought so strongly contrasted. But both of these systems are perfectly natural, indeed inevitable, products of an epoch, such as the Alexandrian Age was, of transition and moral decadence. In such times strong, self-reliant, deeply moral natures ever seek refuge in the philosophy and creed of Zeno, while those of less sturdy faith in the moral order of the world, of a less strong sense of duty, turn to the philosophy and creed of Epicurus.

Springing up in Greece as an offshoot of the Socratic philosophy just after the death of Alexander, Stoicism became the creed of the select spirits of the age. The crowning virtues of the moral ideal it held aloft were self-control, imperturbability, the patient endurance of the ills of life. Amidst the wreck of worlds one must stand unmoved and erect.

In the very rigid restraint it placed upon the appetites, passions, and emotions the Stoic ideal of character differed widely from the ordinary Greek ideal. It approached here the ascetic type.[512] However, in general the Stoic type of character was closely related to the historic ideal of the Greek race. The Stoics adopted the fundamental maxim of classical Greek morality, namely, that man should live conformably to nature. They possessed the common Greek consciousness in the light esteem in which they held the family relations and duties. They were aristocratic in their moral sympathies and looked upon the multitude with disdain. They regarded the gentler virtues, compassion and forgiveness, as weaknesses, and ranked humility as a virtue only in the slave.

Because of the weak sense of duty possessed in general by the Greeks, the Stoic ideal of character did not become a really important factor in the ethical life of the ancient world till after its adoption by the finer spirits, like Marcus Aurelius, among the Romans, to whose sense of “the majesty of duty” the ideal made strong and effective appeal. It never influenced the masses, but for several centuries it gave moral support and guidance to the best men of the Roman race.

Alongside Stoicism grew up Epicureanism, which made pleasure, not gross sensuous pleasure, but rational refined enjoyment, the chief good, and hence the pursuit of pleasure “the highest wisdom and morality.” But this philosophy made pleasurable feeling dependent upon tranquillity of mind. To secure this mental repose, one must get rid of fear of the gods and of death. These ignoble and disquieting fears Epicurus and his disciples sought to banish by teaching that the gods do not concern themselves with human affairs, and that death ends all for man.

Epicureanism in its moral code was at one with the common Greek consciousness in making moderation or prudence a cardinal virtue;[513] but it differed radically from the ordinary Greek mode of thought in its depreciation and neglect of the civic virtues. Hence the system was at once a symptom and a cause of the decay of the Greek city state and of the old moral ideal which was based so largely upon it.

The philosophy of Epicurus, as we have already said, is the natural product of an age of transition and social dislocation. It offers an ideal of life which is eagerly adopted by those unable to combat trouble, by those to whom duty does not appeal as something dignified and majestic. Hence in the decadent and unsettled age of the Roman Empire it became the rule of life of large numbers of the cultured classes of society, and must be regarded as one of the disintegrating agencies of Greco-Roman civilization.

[Sidenote: Advance in humanitarian feelings and growth in ethical cosmopolitanism]

A general view of the society of the Hellenistic world toward the opening of the Christian era discloses the fact that the moral evolution so long in progress has effected such changes in the Greek moral consciousness as to render this ethical movement an important preparation for the incoming of the moral ideal of Christianity. These changes are especially to be observed in the growth of humanitarian sentiment and in a broadening of the moral sympathies.

The Greeks, compared with the Romans, were naturally a humane folk. When it was proposed to introduce at Athens the gladiatorial games, the orator Demonax told the people that they should first tear down the ancestral altar to Pity, a shrine which, in the words of Lecky, “was venerated throughout the ancient world as the first great assertion among mankind of the supreme sanctity of mercy.”[514] One of the motives of Pythagoras in forbidding the use of meat as food was, seemingly, to inspire a horror of shedding blood, even that of an animal. The laws of Athens permitted no punishment more severe than a painless death.[515]

This natural humaneness of the Greek spirit deepened as the centuries passed. Contrasted with the Periclean Age the Platonic Age shows, Professor Mahaffy affirms, “a greater gentleness and softness, ... a nearer approach to the greater humanity of Christian teaching.”[516] We have already noted this movement in the domain of war practices and customs, where it found expression in the amelioration of the gross, archaic barbarities of primitive warfare. In the social sphere the progressive evolution is evidenced by the growing mildness of slavery and the frequency of the manumission of slaves.[517]

The broadening movement ran parallel with the humanitarian. Classical Greek morality, as we have seen, was narrow and racial. Now one of the most important facts in the moral evolution of Hellas was the broadening of the moral sympathies, especially during the three centuries immediately preceding our era. This development is connected closely with the great expansion movement which followed the conquests of Alexander and which resulted in the Hellenization of the East. Everywhere the Greeks came in close contact with various peoples upon whom they had been accustomed to look with aversion or disdain. Ancient prejudices were dispelled, race barriers were leveled, and the moral sympathies overspread wide areas from which they had hitherto been excluded by ignorance and race egotism.

It would doubtless be unhistorical to represent this movement as anything more than a tendency--a dawning recognition by select spirits of the ethical kinship of all men, and the coextension of the moral law with the human race. It may, however, rightly be compared with that broadening of the moral feelings which we have traced among the people of Israel, and which resulted in a morality at first as narrow and exclusive as that of the Greeks, widening at last into the ethical universalism of the great teachers of the nation.

The widening movement was represented, and was given its chief impetus, by the Stoics. The Stoic ideal of character differed from the ordinary Greek ideal especially in its cosmopolitanism. Influenced by the spirit of the age in which it had birth, it ignored the old distinction between Greek and non-Greek and proclaimed the essential brotherhood of man.[518] The Stoic regarded the world and not his native city as his fatherland. The Cynics, whom we may regard as extreme Stoics, looked upon city patriotism as a narrow prejudice and refused to give love of one’s city a place among the virtues. Just as the Greek age was merging into the Greco-Roman the broadening movement found its noblest representative in Plutarch, “the last of the Greeks.”[519] His chief characteristics were his broad interests and his universal moral sympathies. He had moved far away from the common Greek standpoint. He had emancipated himself from the tyranny of the common Greek prejudices. Under the influences of his time he had become a cosmopolitan. To him the Greek was no longer an elect race. His moral sympathies embraced all mankind. His was almost a Christian conscience, save as to the purely theological virtues.

This enlargement of the intellectual and moral outlook of the Greek world presaged the dawn of a new epoch in the moral evolution of humanity. It made easier for many the acceptance of the Gospel teachings of human brotherhood and universal love. Christian ethics was largely debtor to the cosmopolitan spirit of Greek culture, especially as embodied in the Stoic ideal of moral excellence.[520]

To trace further this moral development in the ancient world we must now turn from following its course among the Greeks to follow it among that kindred people, the Romans, who, through the political unification of the world, reënforced this growing universalism in the moral domain, and thereby reached that ethical conception of collective humanity which Israel had reached through spiritual intuition, and Hellas through philosophical reflection and widening culture.[521]